Elena Trotskaya
This is a legacy article; its contents no longer apply to the current iteration of the Frencoverse. ---- "The one scenario that always brings out the best in humanity is warfare. In the flames of battle, people must cooperate, toughen themselves up, learn how to protect themselves and their comrades. You must focus only on the survival of yourself and that which you love and cherish, or else you will be destroyed." ~ to Serena Romana. (*) Introduction Elena Trotskaya is a Chthonian hypersoldier, a General in the Mecharussian Armed Forces, the supreme commander of the Special Purpose Guard Brigade, the Secretariat of Internal Security and the Committee of State Security, posts she acquired before the Second Russo-European War. She is also known for being the Mechanocracy’s most powerful warrior, regularly single-handedly attaining kill-counts in the thousands whenever she is present in a battle. Only a very small handful of individuals have ever come even close to defeating her in combat, and none of them with any measure of ease; among them are Hadrian Kelly, Fred Harrigan and Alain. Background Early life Trotskaya was born on the 12th of July 2111 to Varvara Trotskaya, a quartermaster for the local Civil Pacification garrison in Ufa, Bashkortostan Oblast. Growing up in a less-affluent neighbourhood in northern Ufa, the young Elena was documented as having trust issues related to an early experience of a burglary. As a result, she possessed only a small circle of friends, among whom was Vasiliy Kuznetsov – who would go on to be her first boyfriend. She was known to dislike using social media, explaining that "Proper Mecharussians don't waste their lives with such trivialities". Though Trotskaya never personally knew her father (until 2134), him having left shortly after her birth, he would send her messages and gifts for her birthday and the Workers' Solstice Holiday. One of these gifts was a black army jacket that she acquired for her eighteenth birthday – she still keeps this jacket in her wardrobe to this day. Although Trotskaya developed a degree of social awkwardness, she became more focused on her schoolwork, allowing her to acquire a positive work-ethic. In particular, she would tinker with the machining table that her mother used to maintain the GU troopers' weapons. Her love for metalworking would grow to be such that she developed a strong affinity for it that would last throughout her long life: during breaks, the school workshop would be her most common location, where she would be occupied with her latest project. To finance her hobby, she worked part-time as a waitress in an Ufa cafe. By 2129, she was attending Bashkortostan's Technological College to study nanometallurgy and was about to be transferred to the Institute of Technology in Gorky-Spetsprom. Her education was cut short, however, when she was brutally gang-raped by her boyfriend and several other men. She managed to survive the attack and receive medical treatment, but she was left with mental scars that would stay with her for the rest of her life. Indeed, the only thing left in the material world that inspires genuine terror in her is the threat of a second Rape. Impregnated by the attack, Trotskaya gave birth in secret to a son while being augmented. Initially horrified by the revelation that the rape by Vasiliy had produced a child, she very nearly killed the infant because she thought that he would only remind her of his father. However, she relented, and took it upon herself to raise the child, naming him Alexei. At age five, she had him turned into an ork, the objective of this being to ensure that he would never be subjected to the same terrors as her. All this achieved, however, was her child being converted into a nearly-mindless, mentally-stunted murder machine, precluding him from developing further than a five-year old child. That she quickly grew to hate herself for trying to pawn off her weakness onto her own son ensured that Trotskaya's reaction to Alexei's untimely demise in the 2150s was a mixed one. Though she logically was deeply upset by it, she had been secretly hoping all along that his suffering would have ended with a warrior's death, which it had in both canons. Life as a hypersoldier Trotskaya's first true test as a hypersoldier would be her spearheading the major military campaign known in Mecharussian history as 'the Salvagings' (2129-2134). Throughout her early adulthood, she became known for her ferocity and dogged determination in fighting Pandemonium's Raiders and quickly made a name for herself as one of the Mechanocracy's deadliest assets, to such an extent that she attracted the personal ire of Pandemonium himself. The raider overlord attempted on numerous occasions to destroy her, initially by dispatching his finest assassin Odradek. Trotskaya became acquainted with the deadly warrior in Moscow after he attempted to ambush her, but the attack was a complete disaster and Odradek was forced to retreat. He then attempted to lure her into a trap by using the kidnapped daughter of her trainer, Vyacheslav Drago, with the assistance of raider clan leader and Pandemonium's second-in-command Hammerhead. However, his plot failed once again, with Trotskaya freeing the young Erika Drago from Hammerhead's clutches, killing the raider boss and dispatching Odradek seemingly once and for all. Enraged at this failure to kill her and the deaths of his two most prized lieutenants, Pandemonium devised a plan to bring her to his volcano fortress at Bezymianny. However, he made one crucial mistake in grossly underestimating how many soldiers Trotskaya intended to bring. It was in the Battle of Bezymianny Fortress that she amply demonstrated her talents in command, luring Pandemonium out of safety with a massive orbital bombardment and routing his remaining troops in a combined-arms assault. After a pitched battle at the volcano's summit where Pandemonium very nearly personally killed Trotskaya, she overpowered the raider overlord, threw him into a lava flow and left him to die. Seven years after the defeat of Pandemonium, Trotskaya and her Chthonian soldiers would be called to fight in the Second Russo-European War. Having proven herself an able commander in the Salvagings, Red Army supreme commander Grand Marshal Gordon Kravchenko conferred upon her the army rank of General and command of the Eighth VDV Regiment, with instructions to lead Central European Offensive #1, better known as the 'Trail of Bones' campaign. Taking her own personal squad of Chthonians - Vympel Group - into the fray, she fought the Europeans at Kosice, Vienna and Munich. Trotskaya personally led Mecharussian forces to victory in the legendary Charge over the Grosser Priel - at the cost of nearly her entire regiment and eight Chthonians. Though the near-suicidal Charge smashed through the massive, desperate EFAC counteroffensive and shattered European morale along the entire defensive line from Szczecin in the north to Trieste in the south, allowing the MAF to invade Germany almost with impunity, the monumental casualties sustained (the highest loss of Mecharussian troops in a single battle in the whole war) deeply saddened Trotskaya. It also horrified Kravchenko in spite of her being lauded by the rest of the brass as a war heroine, causing him to grow an intense hatred of her. Meeting Victor Golovkin During the Second Russo-European War, she met Victor Golovkin – who she learned was the son of her mentor, Ivan. She rescued his squad and took him under her wing during the Battle of Vienna, and he fought alongside her and the Chthonians for the remainder of the Trail of Bones campaign. He was assigned after the war to be her second-in-command, replacing the Chthonian Ajax (who perished at Grosser Priel), and leader of the Spetsnaz Alfa Group. She became close friends with the former skinhead: he needed a leader figure to give himself purpose, and she needed someone who she could trust with her life as well as to repay her lifelong debt to his father. For a long time, they insisted that their relationship be platonic for fear of compromising their ability to perform their duties adequately. However, during the Singaporean civil war, the pair declared their love for one another, Trotskaya with great difficulty (having been betrayed twice by men she thought she could trust). In the Main Canon, she also falls in love with Golovkin, but under very different circumstances. In both canons, she becomes pregnant by him, and she gives birth to twins - Evgeniy and Yulia. His 'death' Main Canon Though Golovkin stood by his moral code and remained an ever faithful lover to Trotskaya for two decades, by the mid-2170s, however, he began to show signs of severe posttraumatic stress disorder. Badly scarred by the events of the Utannic invasion, where he watched his own mother be raped and beaten to within an inch of her life by the alien hordes, he blamed himself for not being able to protect her and started to doubt his own moral code, terrified that he would not be able to save Trotskaya should she be faced with a second Rape. In spite of this, he remained strong for several years after the savage conflict, repressing his growing anger and hatred. What finally broke Golovkin was the events of the Global Crusade. After one of his oldest friends, Captain Grigor Grankin, died in his arms during the vicious fighting in the Kazan Organic Ghetto against insurgents assisted by Nexonic troops, he became overwhelmed by his own hatred and personally blasted his way out of the ghetto, slaughtering many civilian men, women and children in the process. Suffering severe wounds that demanded imminent medical attention as he did so as well as a catastrophic mental breakdown, he was tended to by Captain Erina Dmitriyeva, who desperately tried to persuade him to accept treatment after he consistently rejected it, traumatised by what he had done and losing the will to live. He eventually did so, on the condition that he be encased in an armour suit and Dmitriyeva to tell Trotskaya that he died in battle. The purpose of this was a last gesture of goodwill to protect his increasingly-concerned beloved from the horror of knowing that he had fallen to evil. The news from Dmitriyeva that Golovkin "is dead ... killed by the traitors" sent Trotskaya into an emotional downward spiral. Overwhelmed by grief, she flew into a rage and ordered the orbital bombardment of the rebellious Ghettos, an act that killed many millions of her own people. After the sudden and highly explosive end to the Nexus-sponsored insurrection, she turned her fury upon the Nexus itself by deploying a legion to the Caribbean, with three Desolator Brigades to follow and turn the entire island cluster into an irradiated, uninhabitable wasteland. Though her armies were prevented from laying waste to all of the islands by those of the Frenkish, several were completely stripped of all life, an ominous foreshadowing of events to come. After the Crusade, Trotskaya slipped into a deep, bottomless depression. Gone following the 'demise' of Golovkin was the once-optimistic, proud and fair leader of the Mechanocracy of Russia. Though she continued to display herself as such in public, the Red Tigress was in private a broken, hate-filled shell of her former self, her already-dismal condition worsened by bouts of capriciousness, alcoholism and paranoia, her only remaining real friend being the Cybermancer Primarch Timofei Prime. Alternative Canon In the Altcanon, Golovkin's sacrifice came much earlier, at the end of the Flight of the Polunochnaya. Because she had not been prepared for his fall like she had in the Main Canon, Trotskaya suffered an even more severe mental breakdown. After the Six-Day Purge, she virtually disappeared from the public eye until World War IV, before departing again. Very few people knew her after that on a personal level, but deputy-Grand Curator Lev Ermakov, one of a token handful of people amongst her inner circle, documented in his memoirs a broken, borderline psychotic and extremely paranoid shell of her former self in the interwar years. Once the war started, she changed again: Ermakov reported that the outbreak of potentially the most catastrophic conflict in human history left her overjoyed and once again full of life. It was the loss of Golovkin that, for the next twenty years, convinced Trotskaya that the Imperium of Sidhae was no longer a useful asset, but a deadly threat to the human race. Her newly-alienated father, whom Trotskaya bitterly accused of being too weak to prevent her loss, came to the same conclusion, and both of them began planning to cripple if not destroy the Imperium before he handed over power to her - unbeknownst to the innermost kernels of the Mecharussian political elite. Even Yulia, whom Trotskaya can otherwise trust with all of her dark secrets, was only made aware of their different schemes after she stumbled upon a top-secret document, written entirely in Khazard'Vaari calligraphy (unreadable to foreign intelligence, but legible to both OTAN and Trotskaya). The Emancipation Plot (MC) After the war, Trotskaya would spend the latter half of the 2140s and the early 2150s preparing to realise a plan concocted by OTAN to cement Mecharussian control over the human race, using a pre-war Soviet megaweapon known as a 'Psychic Dominator'. In 2149, she had Drago infiltrate the ranks of hardline-socialist terrorist organization Narodnaya Volya and assassinate its prior leader Ilya Magomedov, allowing OTAN to install one of its Diomedian hypersoldiers - I-11148, a character who would come to be known as 'Blackhand' - as its leader, with the intent of using the organisation as a proxy to hide the existence of the plot from foreign intelligence. Learning that all of the existing Psychic Dominators were destroyed by the Sundering, bar one surviving instance hidden on Mars at the abandoned Research Base Ivan, she instructed Blackhand and his men to excavate the base and search for the Dominator. Though the Dominator was recovered, it emerged that it required immense amounts of power to operate - in the exawatt range, a power requirement that could only be met by antimatter. Thus, Trotskaya instructed Narodnaya Volya to procure seven antimatter cores - the group stashed three (procured from the MAF's Urfa Armoury in Turkey) in Aleppo Citadel with the assistance of ISIS, one of which was moved to Mars. They also obtained three more from the EFAC's Keylah Armoury, and the last was stolen from the fusion reactor at the Empty in World City (and was nearly retaken by the Frenkish shortly after it was shipped to Mars). The plot was very nearly unveiled after two unforeseen circumstances occurred: two of the key SVB agents involved in the plot defected to the Frenkish Imperial Intelligence Agency, and a wayward MAF infantry squad stumbled upon the cores in Aleppo by pure chance during the Battle of Aleppo. Trotskaya and OTAN devised Operation Cerberus in an attempt to kill two birds with one stone. (wip) In the Altcanon, the Emancipation Plot is never put into effect, as Blackhand and Narodnaya Volya's top-leading figures are all assassinated by the Imperial Ranger Corps in late 2150 - a mission which also sees the destruction of the last Psychic Dominator. Ascendancy In the Main Canon, Trotskaya comes to power as Grand Curatrix during the Solstice Holiday Coup, concurrently with the Emancipation Plot. As one of the architects behind the plot, she was one of the key figures in its attempted implementation. Though the plot itself ended in failure, the coup that ousted Prokhor Stahlrim from the premiership was a resounding success, resulting in her ascendancy to the position of Grand Curatrix by 2154. In the Altcanon, she comes to power in similar circumstances through the Six-Day Purge, though her premiership is temporarily interrupted by the events leading up to the legendary [[Flight of the Polunochnaya|Flight of the Polunochnaya]]. Both coups happen in 2153, and both with the endorsement of the Supreme Leader (though the Six-Day Purge happens in March, while the Solstice Holiday Coup occurs in December). The first year of her government would be dominated by a military junta, controlled by the Final Thirteen, until she could complete the vast sociopolitical restructuring project that would come to be known as the Trotskaya Reforms. Though a significant portion of the Mecharussian population would attempt to rebel against the new order in the occupied territories, particularly in Finland, the abortive rebellions would be put down through military force. As well as seeing the total restructuring of the Mechanocracy Government, Trotskaya's premiership would also oversee in the Main Canon the Mecharussian response to the Nexonic Global Crusade, the Utannic invasion of Sol in 2174. In the Altcanon, she presides over the invasion and subsequent annexation of Jotunheim in 2155, along with the massive expansion of the Mecharussian Armed Forces to act as a counterweight against the military might of the Imperium of Sidhae. She also commissions the restarting of the Chthonia Programme as Project Echidna, producing 100,000 'Novaya Chthonians' by 2160, with herself, Persey, Peley and Ippolyta each taking control of a 25,000-strong regiment. She would personally lead the 'Immortal Legion' into battle against the Western world during the later stages of World War IV. Personality In spite of her own humanity, Trotskaya despises human emotion and holds an especially strong enmity for liars and cowards, deriving intense personal pleasure from making them suffer - often expressed in the form of a mischievous grin. Described as having no moral compass whatsoever, she is an exceptionally skilled interrogator and torturer, meticulously elevating the practices to a borderline artistic level. Part of her duties as the Mecharussian spymaster is to instruct the finest torturers in the country (i.e. those who work with the SVB’s Thought Reassignment division) in the ‘art’ of inflicting pain. This is not to suggest that she is a sadist, however. The motivation behind her most deplorable actions is always the improvement of others. Her disgust for the ways of baseline humanity fuels every fibre of her being and gives her tremendous determination to better the world around her, through any means necessary - torture and notoriously-brutal instruction tactics for her underlings being just components of her methodology. In terms of material ownership, Trotskaya tries to be as modest as possible, choosing to own a smaller house in Sunikagrad as opposed to the elaborate estates owned by many other senior figures in the Mechanocracy. She also prefers physical copies of information rather than digital. She claims that both of these traits are for security purposes: a smaller house is cheaper to outfit with defences and paper cannot be hacked into. She also owns a trophy cabinet full of polished human skulls and helmets belonging to notable individuals that she has dispatched in her life. Among them are the heads of (an ork that she believes to be) Pandemonium and Hammerhead, as well as the helmet of Frenkish Colonel Fred Harrigan, her arch-nemesis. She is also rumoured to keep the skull of previous Frenkish emperor Jonathan Stark, but this is unlikely as she was not personally responsible for his death. She has also exhibited an intense dislike for Grand Curator Stahlrim, but is able to maintain a positive working relationship with him. Her personal suit of powered armour is heavily-customised and soulforged, and both of her power swords, Deymos and Excidium, were fashioned by her own two hands. Trotskaya is known throughout the Multiverse for her legendary fighting ability, more than able to tackle entire armies with little to no help. Even in a weakened state of pregnancy, she is shown to be more than capable of holding her own against multiple enemies in a fight. In addition to being blisteringly agile and possessing a mastery over almost every weapon known to man, she is also extremely durable - her near-invulnerability is owed to a combination of her powered armour and her extreme cybernetic augmentation. Trotskaya's exact kill-count is unknown, but the most conservative estimate given is 700,000, while the highest is 60 million. Both of these figures, however, are widely considered to be exaggerations by Mecharussian propaganda - the actual kill-count is probably closer to 20,000, which would still rank her among the most prolific killers in human history. Were, however, she not restrained by her struggle against her own humanity and with her troubled past, she could quite easily become a terrifyingly powerful entity, more than a match for the strongest mortal warriors that Mankind and quite possibly the wider Multiverse has to offer. Upon her ascendancy to the position of Supreme Leader in the Main Canon, Trotskaya becomes bitter, depressed and cynical following the death of Golovkin and her own purported failure to unify the human race under one banner, and even displays evidence of mental illness. She also becomes prone to outbreaks of violent anger and develops a liking to committing acts of extreme torture: she constructs on Vyyrahk a 'Field of Eagles' consisting of crucified personal enemies executed, often personally, via blood eagle to demonstrate what becomes of those who anger her. One such victim of Trotskaya's sadism is the Utannic general Vaasi Idris. (A similar 'Field of Eagles' exists on Jotunheim, consisting largely of those Sidhae who have had the complete misfortune to have crossed paths with the Judicator-hunter Belov; the Fobosian hypersoldier uses it to keep track of his kills.) Habits and hobbies Trotskaya nearly always speaks as if writing a formal letter to someone, a trait that she has possessed from a young age. She almost never uses contractions and avoids profanities and slang terms. The only times she breaks this rule is if she is on-edge. One can gauge her mood by observing her speech: if she swears, she is either nervous, upset or angry. A kind of reversal is seen when she is happy, as her speech becomes almost Shakespearean. Golovkin jokes in his memoirs that "you know she's elated when you have no idea what she's talking about". Trotskaya also has a curious way of expressing some of her emotions. For instance, when she is afraid, she will become extremely angry and go into a bloodthirsty berserker-rage, usually lasting for no longer than a few seconds before she calms down and assesses the situation. This is observed in the 2151 Hammerfall Games after briefly panicking during her fight with Sonavier Opal. In the Altcanon, Trotskaya develops an obsession with collecting hourglasses: she adds a new one to a massive shelf in her residence in Jotunheim Citadel every day, and - as of 2172 - she has been doing so for twenty years. Trotskaya's hobbies include weapon-collecting, metalworking and (often to the surprise of many a visitor) flower-arranging. She keeps a massive collection of weapons, all of unique kinds, in the basement of her residence, and her workshop is stocked with all manner of tools, including a nano-lathe. Trotskaya is also an accomplished essay-writer, using them to detail her personal and political views, and an avid reader of poetry and literature; one of her favourite pieces is the sonnet Ozymandias, written by English Romantic Percy Bysshe Shelley. Spoken languages Aside from her mother tongue of Russian, Trotskaya is known to speak fluent English, German, Georgian, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese and Sidh. She has also mastered both the written and the spoken Khazard'Vaari language - she is the only human to have ever done so. One of her personal objectives is to master at least one dialect of Skargh. Physical characteristics Trotskaya is renowned throughout the globe for her physical beauty: she has raven-black hair and onyx-coloured lipstick, measures two metres tall, is slim and muscular, well-endowed, has chalk-white skin and blood-red cybernetic eyes. In spite of this, however, she is known to hate her physical appearance with a passion - Golovkin comments in his memoirs that this is because her looks have remained unchanged since she was eighteen years old (with the obvious exceptions of her skin, eyes and height, all of which are the results of extensive augmentation) and it reminds her of the Rape. He describes her beauty as 'a cocoon of reflection and agony ... a temporal prison, her own hatred its warden'. Every one of Trotskaya's cyber-implants can be used as an offensive weapon in one way or another. For instance, the skin on her hands can be pulled back to reveal razor-sharp claws, her teeth are mounted onto tracks and can be deployed and used like a chainsaw, and her tongue possesses a retractable, monomolecular blade-tipped prehensile whip that can reach out to almost two metres. In addition, she is phenomenally durable, able to survive a blast from an incendiary hand grenade, being impaled through the stomach, losing large chunks of skin and even being blood-eagled without her fighting capability diminishing. She can even survive decapitation (albeit only briefly), thanks to meticulous positioning of her power sources and life support systems. One of her most fearsome augments, however, is dubbed 'Titan mode': while it does not actually increase her size, it injects her with enough combat-grade stimulants and synthetic epinephrine to greatly enhance her strength, endurance and drive her into a bloodthirsty berserker-rage. She is essentially transformed into a death machine that is literally unstoppable, anything other than a lethal shot may as well having no effect on her. Some time after her ascendancy, Trotskaya acquires several key upgrades. The combat-stims and adrenaline of Titan mode are altered so that she can activate it without receiving a near-lethal overdose, a psychic circuit-breaker is embedded into her skull and her synthmetal endoskeleton is exchanged for a hyperalloy one several times stronger. A more visibly-obvious augment is a dual-optic prosthesis replacing the left eye that was ripped out by Prokhor Stahlrim during his last battle. Another one is a personal energy shield, the projectors for which are embedded into her spine: they protrude from her back like an array of short, vicious spikes when the shield is active. In spite of being almost entirely augmented, one notable part of Trotskaya that remains organic and fully intact is her reproductive system, including her womb. She keeps it that way until the loss of Golovkin to remind herself to never allow herself to fall victim to anything similar to the Rape ever again. After his demise, she has her whole reproductive system removed in its entirety, leaving her chaste for the rest of her life so that no man can ever again have the pleasure that she once shared with Golovkin. Notable Appearances Main Canon * Trotskaya begins To Struggle in the Way of Allah as an antagonist, hunting down Rollins and Kelly in Irbil, but is thwarted by the combined efforts of the Peshmerga and the Frenkish Rangers. She re-enters later on to rescue Mendoza, Radio, Bykov, Grishenko and Bulyagin from the Caliphate prison of Al Shumaisi before jointly-leading the assault on Atlas's fortress in the mountains of Afghanistan. * In the 2200s, the Mechanocracy of Mankind attempted to name the Mystra-class star dreadnought in her honour, but - disgusted by the idea of having (in her own words) "a technological monstrosity" bear her name - she had the entire line of warships rechristened. She was, however, able to be persuaded to allow for the lead vessel, and the flagship of the Mechanocratic Starfleet, to retain its name. Alternative Canon * Trotskaya is the Mecharussian protagonist in PTFS In Chaos, first fighting the Antic Order in Banyuwangi, the Overwatch in Kuala Lumpur and participating in the attack/destruction of Zamboanga. Because of her battle-prowess on PTFS soil as well as being a common feature in domestically-produced memes, she is considered a celebrity and a boogeyman among the Singaporean people. * She plays a prominent role in Access Violation and its two sequels, A Blood Debt and Flight of the Polunochnaya. * She duels against Fred Harrigan in the 2151 Hammerfall Games. The two manage to slay each other, culminating in a draw - so far the only such outcome in the entire history of the Games. * She commonly features on the Quotes of People In Your Nation thread to voice her opinions on various subjects. * For unknown purposes, the Synkom accidentally created an entire civilisation of Trotskaya clones, which promptly escaped their control and currently roams their origin universe as a 'Crimson Swarm'. Trivia * Much of the imagery used for Trotskaya consists of edited photographs of Maya 'Echo' Visari from Killzone: Shadow Fall. * The character has much in common with Darth Vader from Star Wars: both are cyborgs, their traumatic youths led them to the paths that they follow, their children were coerced by circumstance to become warriors, they are the chief enforcers of their respective empires, they harbor a quasi-religious devotion to their ideologies, and they both use energy-based, sword-like weaponry. In addition, she is similar in both her worldview and fighting style to Wrath from the anime/manga Fullmetal Alchemist. * Trotskaya is just one of four main characters in the Mecharussian canon whose name was not derived from a random name generator or a list of names that the author keeps on a document (the other three are OTAN, Stahlrim and Nemezida). Category:Characters Category:Mechanocratic Russia Category:Mechanocracy of Mankind Category:Legacy articles